A conversation with writer Sarbpreet Singh
Sarbpreet Singh is a writer, podcaster and commentator based in Boston, USA. He has been a major force in retelling The Story of the Sikhs (1469–1708), distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of his poetic voice as for his development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. From the allegories of The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia to the questing in The Sufi’s Nightingale and the oneiric landscapes of Night of the Restless Spirits, each of Singh’s works reflects upon the events of an extraordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. He is also the founder of the Gurmat Sangeet Project.
In an interview with Aasim Akhtar, conducted in Lahore, he discusses his engagement with the history of the Sikhs, the Sikh identity and his devotion to Shah Hussain’s Sufi poetry. Excerpts:
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asim Akhtar: What were your childhood experiences like?
Sarbpreet Singh: I was born in Saharanpur in northern India which is where my grandfather had migrated to after he left Lahore at Partition. I was raised in Sikkim in the Eastern Himalayas until I graduated from high school after which I went to an engineering college in northern India. Some aspects of my childhood that are relevant to my work. One of those is that since we are Sikhs who lived in Sikkim, we were a novelty because there were only two Sikh families in Gangtok. So, I grew up far removed from Punjabi culture – the seat of Sikh faith – in a cultural vacuum in the context of my own culture. As a child, and even as an adolescent, the thing that really defined me and stayed with me for the rest of my life was my love of reading. From an early age, I loved literature and read everything, often times books I was not supposed to when I was young. My father had a decent library, and I would dip into it. When I got to the top grade in high school, I decided to study sciences. The reason was that when I was growing up the most valued careers in India were either engineering or medicine. At the same time, I also elected to study English literature, and got exposed to a lot of writers who I would not have otherwise through my recreational reading.
I had one younger sibling. We were a Punjabi family in a cultural island. My parents made attempts to connect us to the local gurdwara. They certainly spoke Punjabi at home. I learnt to speak Punjabi but I could not learn to read Gurmukhi.
AA: When did you take up writing seriously?
SS: I graduated from college in 1985 and worked for India for two years until ’87, before I left for the US to study computer science. Once I got to the US, somewhat oddly, I met people whom I found inspiring and felt that I needed to engage with my roots. That’s when I started reading about the Sikh faith. (I was obviously limited to reading things that had been in English). My college had a reasonable humanities section in the library, and I was able to find a couple of books on Sikhism, most notably JD Cunningham’s History of the Sikhs, probably the first serious book of Sikh history ever written when he served the British East India Company. That and an encounter with a few interesting people set me on a journey. As I started engaging with the history of my faith, I experienced the first stirrings of pride. Until then, my identity as a Sikh had been more or less a burden for me – a turban, a beard and a visibly different identity certainly brought its own challenges, whether it was in Sikkim or the US.
It was on understanding the history of the faith that I started to feel a sense of belonging. Somewhat serendipitously, I started exploring some more recent history. We are talking about the late ’80s when I was in the US. Five years ago, there had been some terrible events in India. In 1984, the Golden Temple was attacked and subsequently the Prime Minister Gandhi, who had ordered the attack, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Then there was an orgy of bloodletting in Delhi and in other parts of India in which thousands of Sikhs were targeted. They were killed, women were raped and their homes were torched. My sense of what had happened was quite incomplete. The reason for that is that Indian media carefully censored the news, and in a time of heightened fear of what was going on in the Punjab, the narrative essentially was that the Sikhs had brought trouble onto themselves by confronting the government; that nobody wanted to attack the Sikhs in that manner but after the assassination there was an eruption of spontaneous rage that targeted the Sikhs.
While in the US, I was able to get hold of sources which suggested that what had happened was dramatically different. I read a report produced by two human rights groups in Delhi who were non-Sikh. Madhu Kishwar was one of the greatest journalists of that time and ran a progressive magazine called Manushi. Delhi-based academic Reena Das wrote about the trauma of some of the children who had survived ’84. So, I became sceptical. When I saw multiple independent sources that presented the same perspective, there was little doubt that they were ‘coloured’ in any way. When it sank in that what had happened in India and in Delhi, in particular, was not a spontaneous riot as it had been categorised but an organised massacre, it led to a lot of turmoil, anguish and anger. And that was the first time I wrote anything.
It is very common to portray the supplicant as the feminine and the divine as the masculine in all these traditions. Romantic love is very often used as a metaphor for spiritual love.
AA: How did Kultar’s Mime, the long poem with a political overtone, originate?
SS: I wrote this poem called Kultar’s Mime which was fictionalisation of some of the stories of children that Reena Das had presented in her paper. For example, she talked about a young deaf-mute boy whose father was hanged and lynched in front of his eyes. This little boy, several years later, unable to articulate his pain in any other manner, would act it out with his hands and body. That real-life child called Avatar became Kultar, and Kultar’s Mime told the story of the Delhi massacre and that of other children.
I also wrote a few short stories. In pre-independence India, one of the seminal events that we remember is Jallianwala Bagh in which the British opened fire on a peaceful assembly, killing hundreds of people. I wrote another story which connects the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the 1984 massacre in the sense that there’s an old man who is a survivor of Jallianwala Bagh who dies in the latter massacre. The irony is that he survives the British bullets, but he falls to the bullets of his own country while he is merely sleeping in the courtyard of a gurdwara. That was Night of the Restless Spirits. This was in the early ’90s.
For the next three decades, I was fully focused on my professional career. It was around that time that I decided to go back to writing. There was a very popular web magazine run out of Canada called Sikh Chic. Someone introduced me to Sardar T Sher Singh who was the founder, an attorney by training. He encouraged me to write a column for him on any subject from a Sikh perspective. For the next couple of years, I wrote a regular column for the magazine covering a wide range of topics. The first column was commissioned; he asked me to write on Nelson Mandela from a Sikh perspective. Right along the way, history has always fascinated me. So, I started researching various little-known aspects of Sikh history, colonial times and the early Sikh Diaspora which consisted of soldiers serving in the British army after the British had taken the Punjab, who went to the Far East as policemen and then made their way to the US. I was very fascinated by the Lahore court of Ranjit Singh. I wrote several long articles about it, about the little-known personalities who populated the court and started to build a body of work. The epiphany, however, came a little later.
AA: How did the poem become a play?
SS: In 2012, my daughter who was a first-year theatre student at that time, was looking for material for her new project. She said she wanted to take my poem and turn it into a play. She went ahead and created a play which was very well-received initially in Boston. Some of my friends, deeply moved, suggested that it actually needs to be seen in India where the massacre has been brushed under the rug. Two years later, we revived the play with a professional cast. Harvard University was the first performance venue, then New York and the Academic Conference in Ottawa. With a little bit of trepidation, we brought the play to India and presented it in Delhi, Chandigarh and Amritsar. Much to our surprise, the reaction from the audience was tremendously positive, with a tremendous outpouring of empathy in response to the play. We continued to tour the play for two and a half years in six countries, presenting it 90 plus times, including the British and Scottish parliaments, the Parliament of World Religions and almost every major university in Canada, the US and the UK.
After I was done with the play by 2017, I started focusing fully on writing. Some of my columns on Ranjit Singh were book-length. I added a few more pieces and my first book The Camel Merchant of Philadelphia was published in 2019. Based on a collection of non-fictional pieces about various characters, it met with spectacular success.
By that time, I had also started a podcast called The Story of the Sikhs, which was a retelling of Sikh history, with a lot of translations of traditional poems with music thrown in. That was followed by my third book The Story of the Sikhs which was a retelling of the lives of the Sikh Gurus, based heavily on research. Also, in a departure from many Sikh history books, it draws on our own sources. There is a lot of medieval Punjabi literature that was written in Braj Bhasha, which is largely not read by people these days. These are beautiful works of poetry that recount Sikh history. An example of that is Gurpratap Suraj Granth written by Mahakavi Santokh Singh which is a huge work in Braj poetry. I translated some of these poems and incorporated them into my history book.
AA: What is the background of your devotion to Shah Hussain’s poetry that culminated in the novel The Sufi’s Nightingale?
SS: There was a point in my life when, for various personal reasons, including the passing of my mother, I was very sad. I had come across the name Madho Lal Hussain when I was doing my research on Ranjit Singh who used to go to the darbar of Madho Lal Hussain on every Basant. Several travellers have written about it. I remember being very intrigued by the name. Then, of course, I discovered, that it was actually two different people: A lot of people say Madho Lal and Hussain when it was actually Madho and Lal Hussain which is how the latter was known before he came to be known as Shah Hussain because he used to wear red robes. I had not encountered his poetry because I didn’t grow up rooted in Punjabi culture. Sufi poetry was not something I had engaged with at a deep level. When I started reading Shah Hussain’s poetry, I found that it really spoke to me, and since I have a deep connection with Sikh sacred music or Gurbani Sangeet, I have been archiving and preserving it for 25-30 years. I have a background in Sikh sacred music and when Shah Hussain’s kafis appealed to me, I started creating my own melodies to sing some of those. I found that those had a healing effect on me. So, I continued to sing these kafis for more than two years before I wrote a single word on him.
Somewhere along the journey, I got so curious about the man who had articulated the pain of separation in such a touching manner that I wanted to know more about him. The instant impulse was to write the biography of Shah Hussain but when I discovered that biographical information about him was rather sparse, I gave up the idea. That’s when I decided to use what I knew about him in a rough framework and fill everything else in with my imagination.
AA: Some scholars are of the view that Shah Hussain’s reputation as a poet is eclipsed by the romantic poetry over his spiritual verse. What is your view?
SS: Scholars write from a position of great authority and knowledge about both Shah Hussain and the Sufi practice. Unfortunately, I don’t write from that position because I have never been immersed in it my entire life. My book is a product of very deep research but it’s not something I have lived, day in and day out. What I am trying to say is that I am not an expert on Shah Hussain by any stretch of imagination. I just want to preface my comments by saying that I have a deep love for his poetry.
Whatever sources I found had nothing to tell about which kafis came from which period in his life. The notion of kafis being representative of romantic love is something that needs to be dealt with a little further. In the entire poetry of the Indian subcontinent of that time – whether you are talking about Shah Hussain’s kafis or the kalaam of the Sikh gurus or of other bhagats – it is common to portray the supplicant as the feminine and the divine as the masculine in all these traditions. Romantic love is very often used as a metaphor for spiritual love. Scholars have argued, notably Mohan Singh Deewana who wrote the first book on Shah Hussain (he’s credited with discovering some of the kafis and bringing them to the world) that when Shah Hussain was talking about ishq and separation, he was not talking about the beloved; he’s talking about the divine. Given the fact that I have read so much spiritual poetry and actually translated it from other contexts, this motif of a lover yearning for his or her beloved is used for the supplicant and the divine. From that perspective, I would not see a strong basis for dichotomising the kafis.
The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad